The work: John Hart, Composition 0170, 2023. Pigment and oil on canvas board, 120 x 90cm. Courtesy: the artist.
“My primary interest is mainly in the aesthetics of the work”, says artist John Hart. “What I mean by the term aesthetic is the use of techniques that establish a sense of order within the picture plane.” Hart’s work is thus not about the subject itself, but rather the formalities of constructing beauty on canvas, considering composition, colour balance, pattern, shape, and perspective. In Composition 0170, we see a cloth gently pinned to a wall, illuminated with harsh studio lighting to best showcase the many dips and folds of the material. The plainness of the cloth draws our eye to the essentials of the subject, and to the complex distributions of shadow and form. This work, like many of Hart’s others, started life as a photograph. It was then digitally altered to emphasise focus on the subject, and then printed to canvas. Finally, the artist used this image as a platform to render the scene in oil paint, paying great attention to detail in order to retain the realism of the underlying photograph. “This has always been painting’s claim to fame”, states the artist, “the ability to give an illusion of the real”. The finished product is the epitome of a still life — an image that imitates reality, utilising every compositional artifice in his visual vocabulary to produce a simulacrum of life.